Is questioning the most important skill for the KM professional?

Perhaps the most important skill for the KM professional is the skill of Questioning.

Questions are the hook from which most of your knowledge hangs. Anyone with small children knows that itireless questioning underpins their early learning. The same principle applies in organisations.  Making knowledge conscious, making it explicit, and capturing or transferring that knowledge is triggered through the use of questions.

Poor questions result in poor knowledge, or result in knowledge never been identified in the first place. We recognised this recently when working with a company who had been trying to identify knowledge through Retrospects, without giving any training in questioning skills to the Retrospect facilitators. As a result, the knowledge gathered was superficial and of very low value.

Questioning is important in knowledge interviews, when you are trying to help the interviewee to reflect on their experience. Group questioning works the same way in the after action review and retrospect processes. In communities of practice, the facilitator often needs to “question the question”, and find out what a community member is really asking about and looking for, before they a question can be answered.

Questioning techniques include the use of open questions, the use of probing questions to get down to the next level of detail, the use of closed questions to home in on a learning point, and the use of summarising and feeding back to ensure you have fully understood the answers. We terach the skills of open questioning, and the use of question trees, in our core Knowledge Management traning courses.

Listening skills are also very important, and are part of good questioning technique.  Listening carefully to the answer, assessing how much knowledge has been provided, and asking additional questions to fill the gaps – this is also part of the Knowledge Manager’s skillset.

Ensure your KM staff are skilled in questuioning and listening.